Sixth European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (EUROSPEECH'99) Budapest, Hungary September 5-9, 1999

Prosodic Correlates of Information Structure in Swedish Human-Human Dialogues

Merle Horne, Petra Hansson, Gösta Bruce, Johan Frid

Dept. of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Helgonabacken 12, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden

Investigation of travel agent (~System) Task-related utterances reveals intonational contours where focal accents occur on information given previously in the dialogue by the client (~User). The accentuation can be related to the interactive nature of dialogue where the information holder picks up on a Task-related topic introduced by the client and comments on it in an engaged manner.

Keywords: prosody, accentuation, information structure, dialogue, speech synthesis, Given-New

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Bibliographic reference.  Horne, Merle / Hansson, Petra / Bruce, Gösta / Frid, Johan (1999): "Prosodic correlates of information structure in Swedish human-human dialogues", In EUROSPEECH'99, 29-32.